In just a decade, Tom Hicks has seen a staggering reversal of fortunes

As the millennium was approaching, Tom Hicks was the toast of
the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

A dozen years later, he's just toast.

Hicks basked in the glow of success as his Texas Rangers won
American League West division titles in 1998 and 1999. The Dallas
Stars won hockey's Stanley Cup in spring 1999 and returned to the
Stanley Cup Finals the next year.

And in December 2000, Hicks signed Alex Rodriguez, perhaps the
best player in baseball, to an unprecedented 10-year, $252 million
contract with the Rangers.

Everything Hicks touched seemed to turn to gold.

The sports landscape in North Texas was different then. The
Dallas Mavericks suffered their 10th consecutive losing season in
1999-2000, as new owner Mark Cuban had just purchased the team in
January. The Dallas Cowboys finished 8-8 in 1999 and then endured
three consecutive 5-11 seasons.

There were plenty of fans who wished Hicks could own all four
franchises.

Now he is the disgraced, soon-to-be former owner of the Rangers,
pending what is expected to be a rubber-stamp confirmation vote of
Major League Baseball owners for the Chuck Greenberg-Nolan Ryan
group next week.

In the new purchase agreement, Hicks does not retain any
ownership in the Rangers and will not be paid $70 million in a side
deal for the property he owns around Rangers Ballpark in Arlington
- the leased and owned parking lots he will probably divest himself
of for far less money.

Hicks also will lose his ceremonial title as chairman emeritus
of the Rangers, as well as season tickets and free parking.

The Stars, meanwhile, have been on the market since early in the
year when Hicks said he was looking for new investors or someone to
purchase the team outright.

His reversal of fortune isn't all situated in North Texas,
either. In 2007, Hicks and George Gillette Jr. purchased the
Liverpool soccer franchise in England's Premier League for $431
million. The team lost $24 million last year, and now Hicks and
Gillette are trying to sell.

So what happened? Did Hicks' bubble burst when the economy slid
into the deepest recession since the Great Depression?

Did he display poor business acumen thinking he could own three
professional sports franchises in an era of multimillion-dollar
player salaries, escalating ticket prices and competition for
discretionary spending?

Or did Hicks, ranked in 2009 as one of Forbes magazine's richest
Americans, worth more than $1 billion, start believing his press
clippings and spend his way into an economic morass?

Hicks built his fortune as a leveraged buyout specialist, buying
companies with borrowed money, building them up and then flipping
them for a significant profit, sharing the spoils with the
lenders.

The story that is almost fable is how Hicks and his then-partner
Robert Haas purchased Seven-Up and Dr Pepper in the mid-1980s for
$646 million and later sold them for $2.5 billion.

In 1989, Hicks and John Muse formed the private equity firm
Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, which enjoyed great success in the
1990s, especially capitalizing on the Internet and technology boom.
That enabled Hicks to purchase the Stars in 1995 for $84 million
and the Rangers in 1998 for $250 million.

A year later, Hicks used the threat of forming his own cable
sports network, with the Rangers and Stars as the cornerstones, to
negotiate a $500 million deal with Fox Sports Southwest.

Flexing his economic biceps, Hicks increased the payrolls of his
teams and enticed Rodriguez to Texas with a contract that raised
eyebrows around baseball. The irony is that Hicks had once decried
the free spending of then-Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

Hicks also put his two sports teams under one umbrella - Hicks
Sports Group, which inherited the $525 million in loans he made to
underwrite his sports operation. Major League Baseball has loaned
Hicks $40 million to meet his financial commitments with the
Rangers.

In April 2009, Hicks defaulted on those loans when he was unable
to make interest payments. More than a year later, the Rangers
filed Chapter 11, which was expected to expedite the transfer to
Greenberg-Ryan but instead mired the sale in bankruptcy court and
eventually led to Wednesday's often-contentious auction.

Although Hicks came to federal bankruptcy court for the
proceedings, he left without watching any of the bidding
process.

He issued a statement Thursday saying: "The Hicks family will
always love this franchise. We will always consider ourselves as
huge fans of the Texas Rangers."

And perhaps in a statement shared by fans of the team and all
parties involved, Hicks said: "Our family is both relieved and
energized that this sale is finally near completion."

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